Discovering Strengths: An Appreciative Inquiry into Women’s Pilgrimage Leadership
Combining comparative religious studies, gender studies, and the twenty-first century historiographical turn toward the sacred matters for leadership studies, and ultimately, for reducing radicalization and building a humane world.
To be clear, I am Orthodox Jewish, not Christian, and I study comparative religious practices as an academic researcher.
Gender Analysis Reveals Hidden Dynamics
Research demonstrates that putting gender at the center of analysis reveals significant limitations in anti-radicalization work, showing how masculinity and femininity inform the radicalization process. When I study how women navigate authority in complementarian churches, I’m revealing how gender expectations shape who gets to lead, how communities understand authority, and what alternatives exist to rigid hierarchical models that can fuel extremism.
As an Orthodox Jewish woman studying religious women’s leadership, I embody the cultural competency I’m trying to build. I know what it’s like to negotiate religious authority as a woman, understand the value of tradition, and recognize genuine faith across theological boundaries. I study Christian women’s leadership as an outsider to that tradition but an insider to questions of women’s religious authority under orthodox constraints.
Religious Resources for Cultural Competency
My goal is to add to the world through prosocial cultural competency skills. That starts with taking people’s religious lives seriously, documenting their strengths, and building bridges of understanding across traditions. This is leadership studies in service of peace.
The Sacred as Central
Contemporary scholarship now advocates for a historiography that integrates the sacred rather than relegating it to the margins, recognizing that historians can revisit the sacred as a central element in shaping historical societies, cultures, and identities.1
I take religious belief seriously as a motivating force in people’s lives.
This respect is essential for genuine cultural competency.
Building Understanding Through Education
Education plays a crucial role in promoting mutual understanding by fostering respect, reducing religious ignorance, and countering extremist ideologies. Multi-faith and intercultural dialogue can contribute to efforts to curtail violent extremism by addressing key areas of concern in the radicalization of individuals. Appreciative dialogue is essential to reveal commonalities that unite humanity, teach respect for differences, and expose fraudulent extremist teachings.
- 1. Enrico Beltramini, “Toward a Historiography of the Sacred,” Religions 15, no. 12 (December 11, 2024): 1516, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15121516. ↩︎